All entries tagged: Hauser Center
Non-profit news outlets deserve a tax exemption for ad revenue
In 2007, I wrote about a sport known as Internet hunting that had been prohibited in 33 states with a national ban pending before Congress. All that, despite the fact that no one actually hunts animals over the Internet. “It’s pretty easy to outlaw something that doesn’t exist,” said a lobbyist for the NRA, which supported the bans.
I thought about Internet hunting Tuesday when Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, introduced the “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” which would ease the tax burden on newspapers that operate as non-profit organizations. (You can read the full text here.) Sure, newspapers could use some hefty revitalization, but this earnest piece of legislation addresses a societal problem that does not exist.
The most important thing to know about Sen. Cardin’s three-page bill is that it would only apply to printed, ink-on-fiber newspapers that incorporate as non-profits — not sites like MinnPost and Voice of San Diego that have actually shown promise in this realm. Existing newspapers aren’t particularly interested in 501(c) status when they’re still losing money. People forget that non-profit does not mean unprofitable, and a broken business model works just as poorly in the public sector as the private one.
Sen. Cardin’s spokeswoman, Susan Sullam, told me that the bill is narrowly focused because “the senator believes and a lot of us believe that newspapers are the ones that do the actual reporting on issues.” Susan, I’m sorry for my terse reaction to that comment when we spoke, but it’s hard to imagine the future of non-profit journalism is in print.
The other thing to know about this bill is that it will probably languish and die in the Senate Finance Committee. But it’s still worth discussing because, despite the flaws noted here — and in similarly critical posts by Tim Windsor, Rick Edmonds, Steve Yelvington, and Jeff Jarvis — the Newspaper Revitalization Act touches on some crucial questions around non-profit news that better legislation could address.
Bill Baker: Is there a nonprofit future for American journalism?
William F. Baker, the longtime executive at New York’s PBS stations, is temporarily here at Harvard as a senior research Fellow at the Kennedy School’s the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. Not long ago, he led a discussion whose title was “The Future of Journalism,” but which — like a lot of those talks these days — spent a lot of time on the industry’s current problems. Here’s a four-minute highlight reel, followed by some notes about the proceedings:
